Mass iOS 7 Upgrades Lead to Huge Network Congestion on Universities.

With the highly-anticpated iOS 7 release day finally upon us, excitement for Apple’s new software quickly turned to disenchantment and public outcry as students were unable to download it, and others were left without an Internet connection altogether. 

As students tried to upgrade to iOS 7 over their campus WiFi connection, many did not succeed as they were plagued with error messages, and impossibly lengthy download times. Students were quick to turn to Twitter to voice their discontentment with slow download times, pointing their fingers at their school’s Internet services. And for every student frustrated that they couldn’t play around with their updated iPhone or iPad, there was another student frustrated that they could not do their homework.

While the snarky student commentary is a bit humorous, in all seriousness, the mass iOS 7 upgrade not only inconvenienced students, it brought huge periods of network latency and downtime to many college campuses during peak hours. In a school-wide email at Ohio University, students were explicitly instructed to wait to download iOS 7, and NYU sent out this mass message:

If networks had prepared in advance for this event with a Network Control solution, connection problems could have been avoided altogether. Lectures would not have been disrupted, office administration tools would not have faltered and students would have been able to access course materials and complete assignments on time. These massive spikes in traffic could have been easily mitigated by either blocking the iOS update or throttling it by setting policies intelligent policies, or using Exinda’s Edge Cache to remediate the strain.

If you have an Exinda appliance already in place, an Edge Cache high performance add-on sits between the Internet and your network, to enable single-sided caching of Internet based content. Meaning, as the first student on campus downloads iOS 7, the data gets cached to the device. Subsequent downloads of the software upgrade would then be pulled from the device itself, not the Internet, instantly preventing latency, outages, and incredible headaches.

To see for yourself just how easy it is to create a policy to minimize the impact of software updates on your network, watch our 3 Minute Demo below or go here.

Though the iOS 7 download hype will slowly die down in the coming weeks, the Windows 8.1 update is coming October 17 and OS X Mavericks will be available for download around the same time. To ensure that you do not lose your most mission-critical applications in another mass software download wave, check out Exinda’s whitepaper on assuring your network, or visit our support forum for more information.

If you need further advice on your next-generation WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products, talk to us because LogicalTech can assist you to improve your end user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN and most importantly to reduce your network operating costs for your IT executives.

You can also find more information about Exinda here.